When Australia voted no in the Indigenous voice referendum last month, the news reached Britain almost instantly, but background information about Indigenous Australians was less readily accessible. For that, you could watch the work of Indigenous film-makers, such as Warwick Thornton (Samson and Delilah, Sweet Country), Ivan Sen (Mystery Road), Leah Purcell (The Drover’s Wife) and Rachel Perkins, the director of the musical comedy Bran Nue Dae and now this documentary. It asks, among other questions: who can we trust to tell the truth about our nations’ 235-year shared history?
Perkins is a solemn, sincere presence throughout, usually clad in a black cattleman hat. She begins her journey at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Here, the walls are engraved with the names of the fallen and garlanded with poppies, “lest we forget”. But Australia’s memory is selective, says Perkins. Between 1788 and 1934, about 100,000 Indigenous lives were lost in conflicts between British settlers and the Indigenous population. It is a figure similar to the number who died fighting in Australia’s wars overseas, yet only those in the second group are commemorated.
